Hello! 

We are your curators, Jordan Simi, Dani Khan, Sammie Gautreaux, Rylie Finnegan, and Sophia Allen. We are students of Agnes Scott College who come from different backgrounds & identities. We’ve created this website as a final project for our Intro to Queer Studies with Professor Lauran Whitworth of the Women and Gender Studies Department to create an online exhibition together featuring our archival artifacts. Professor Whitworth put us into assigned groups to have different class years and types of artifacts reflected on our website while still having the potential for an underlying theme. We came up with the idea of “Candid Queerness” after listening to class discussions where a classmate mentioned the frankness/candidness of being queer, which led us to think about the dichotomy of being queer/”candid” and the importance of showing the different sides of the queer community. We hope you enjoy this website and that our work impacts you as you go through the various artifacts! 

 

The gallery displays a focus on queer identity and shows the two sides of candid queerness as either a natural state of being or a truthful/straightforward response. This indicates the intimacy of queerness as well as the pride of being queer. Being personally invested in the queer community, we love to show the depths and intricacies of queer identity. Simple moments, like living in a home with others or writing, can be as fundamentally queer as a nonnormative relationship. 

 

For our gallery, we wanted to define and broaden the perspective of the word candid & how it relates to being queer. According to Oxford Languages, “candid” can be defined in two ways. Our group believes these definitions can also be applied to the presentation of being queer within the LGBT community. The first definition is to be “truthful & straightforward; frank.” Using being frank, the queer community has repeatedly been unabashedly and unapologetically themselves in contrast to society’s view of heteronormativity. Through art, performance, & literature, the LGBT+ community either highlights problems that affect the queer community or celebrates their own identity. The second definition is “a photograph of a person taken informally.” Through the definition of a candid photograph, we examine the intimacy of being queer– what it means to be just existing as a member of the LGBT community and how that appears in photographs or other artifacts. This analysis of the dichotomy of perspectives of being queer is to highlight the variety of representation. The goal of this project is to show that both perspectives are representative of the community as a whole.